The Contested Role of the Digital Humanist: Some Scenario Insights

Are we entering a golden era of digital creativity or facing a digital dark age?

 *Please note this event has unfortunately been cancelled* 

Digital technology increasingly pervades all settings of humanities practice and virtually every stage of knowledge production. However, technology adoption and digital mediation has not been uniform across all settings or stages, and the role and status of digital humanists is equally uneven and fragmented.

Consider these labels for example: adjunct technician, hybrid-scholar, para-academic, or so-called Alt-Ac. This diversity might be celebrated as reflecting greater openness and multivocality within the DH movement, but equally it could be argued that such diversity is unsustainable, and that standards are becoming insufficiently rigorous. 

However, uncontrollable external factors such as economic instability, political change, and technological disruption can radically change and redefine roles and career trajectories, and reshape our disciplinary knowledgescapes. Therefore, the possibility of having to deal with the consequences of not just constant change, but also potentially massively disruptive upheaval, needs to be considered seriously.

To avoid, or mitigate, the destructive aspects of such destabilizing change to the Digital Humanities we apply the futurity technique of scenario analysis. In this analysis, we develop and explore four plausible, contesting, but not mutually exclusive, potential futures and ask three fundamental questions to inform future organizational designs, development plans and knowledge development and exchange strategies: What could happen? What would be the impact? What needs to be done to be ready and able to respond effectively?

Dr Paul Reilly is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Archaeological Computing Research Group at the University of Southampton. Paul's current research interests lie in the relationships between archaeology in the field and the digital embodiments of archaeological knowledge. In particular investigating how and where these digital embodiments are created, manipulated, transformed, presented, and interpreted, and to explore the philosophical and social impacts of information technology on archaeology and related disciplines.

Dr Costas Papadopouloss an Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities and Culture Studies at Maascrict University. Costas research spans the development of virtual worlds to interpret societies of the past, to the application of computational imaging to analyse material culture, to the use of digital ethnographic methods to evaluate digital pedagogy and interactive teaching methods. More recently, his research has focused on the shift from the analogue to the digital, its affordances and limitations, as well as on new forms of social media, in which traditional research outputs are replaced by increasingly multimedial forms of born digital content.

This event is free. All are welcome to attend.